David Hume (1711-1776)

David
Hume was
born April 24, 1711 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Before Hume, most
philosophers were accused of being atheists; Hume was the first one to
admit it.

In eighteenth century British society his admission created
something of a public scandal, however, rather than recant, he chose to
support his position with philosophical arguments.

En route to ridding philosophy of 'metaphysical nonsense',
Hume reduced Locke's,
empiricism to a point of skepticism and went one step further than Berkeley's
denial of materialism, by denying the existence of everything - except
our perceptions. He once famously said, "I am nothing but a bundle of
perceptions".

According to Hume, we really know nothing for sure. Whatever
we think we know is based upon our experience of the external world
(empiricism), but there is not even rational proof that such a world
exists. Furthermore, even if there is an external world, all
conceptions of 'cause' and 'effect' relationships, as in claimed
scientific study, are impossible to determine. The supposition that an
event is followed by a succeeding event, is merely human expectation
projected onto reality.

Hume's skepticism was furthered in his assertion that human
belief in causation is merely inductive reasoning - the process that
leads us to make generalizations from observing a number of similar
situations. He claimed that inductive reasoning is not reliable enough
to lead us to any particular truth and that all scientific laws are
merely generalizations from inductive reasoning.

Along with the position that we can't know that an external
world exists, we cannot justify the claim to have knowledge of the
existence of God, the human soul or absolute moral values.

In his first and probably best work, Treatise
of Human Nature, Hume examines the ways in which
we, as human beings, perceive the world. He maintains we have two types
of perceptions - impressions, which are all our 'sensations, passions
and emotions,' and ideas, which are the 'faint images of these
impressions in thinking and reasoning'. These impressions and ideas can
be simple or complex. Impressions cause ideas but ideas do not cause
impressions. We have the faculty of memory, which retains ideas in
order of which they occur, and the faculty of imagination, which can
rearrange or combine ideas derived from impressions.

Interestingly,
Hume observes that we never experience our own self. He puts forth that
we have no conception of the self as a non-material substance existing
alongside our flow of thoughts and experiences. Rather, the self is
the flow of experiences. His theory of self is often referred to as the
'bundle theory'. In other words, the self is not the non-material
substance in addition to the bundle of thoughts and experiences, it is
that bundle.

While Locke's empiricism acknowledged an external world
separate from our perceptions of it, and Berkeley's denied the
existence of material substance, conceding only the existence of minds
and their ideas, Hume went further, arguing that there is little reason
to assert the existence of either.

Hume's empiricism was one of experience alone. All that we are
entitled to say, according to Hume, is that there are briefly lived
experiences with neither cause nor object in an outer world and without
necessarily any connection between them.

Hume's skepticism and brand of empiricism let go of all
previous philosophical claims and presuppositions. It raised important
points and questions that hitherto had not been addressed. His work
paved the way for progress and the search for truth in a new and
different direction.